An Untamed State (6 page)

I guessed Michael would be giving Christophe a bath, a bottle in the absence of my breast, putting the baby to bed. I wondered if Christophe would fall asleep easily without me. I talked to my son every night as he fell asleep, told him important and silly things so he could hear the sound of my voice, so he could always know I loved him and chose to spend time with him. Michael would talk to Christophe as he fell asleep. My husband would do that for me but it would not be the same. Christophe would know I wasn’t there.

I had to go to the bathroom again but the ransom for that small dignity would be high. A car raced through the alley blaring music. I was so tired. My body felt heavy. I lay on my side, my back to the wall so I could keep my eye on the door. I waited and waited and tried to ignore everything my body needed and would soon have to endure. In the before I took the sanctity of my body for granted. In the after my body was nothing. It was a matter of time. I had known that from the moment I was taken. The waiting was worse than anything I could imagine. My imagination was still quite limited then. That is no longer the case.

W
aiting. It was terrible. The house was quiet, too quiet, a cavernous and echoing shell without Mireille. Michael had never gotten used to his wife’s family’s wealth. When they were in Miami it was easy to pretend his wife was more like him, middle-class, born and raised. Sure, they lived a nice life but they worked hard. In Haiti, there was no way to pretend. The opulent homes, the cars and the drivers and people always waiting on you hand and foot and beach houses bigger than most people’s houses back in the States and everyone wearing designer everything and so many unspoken rules about how to behave. Half the time, Michael was afraid to open his mouth for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing around people he knew nothing about. Miri always assured him he was fine but he felt out of place around his wife’s family and secretly suspected they didn’t think he was good enough for her though Lord knows they were too mannered to admit it.

Michael sat up in the large bed he normally shared with Miri when they visited her parents. He could almost see the outline of her body in the sheets, feel her feet stretched over his legs. Next to him, Christophe slept fitfully, twisting around. Michael frowned. Normally their son slept peacefully.

The laptop on his thighs was warm, the fan whirring softly. Michael’s eyes were dry and heavy. Too much time had passed. He continued scouring the Internet for as much information as possible about international kidnappings and ransom and proof of life—developing a bewildering vocabulary for a nightmare he had never imagined, not even in his darkest moments of trying to understand his wife’s country.

The sharp pain just beneath Michael’s breastbone would not go away. Every sound startled him from his stupor, but only briefly. Mostly, he thought, “This can’t be real. This is not happening. This cannot be real.”

Earlier, after a cursory visit from a pair of police officers who took a few notes and promised to “investigate,” Michael and his in-laws waited for a phone call that did not come. The kidnappers were sticking to their schedule. It would be another day still before they would know where to bring the ransom, how much that ransom might be, a ransom Sebastien seemed unwilling to pay. Michael couldn’t allow himself to even consider such a possibility. It made no sense. Sebastien had to be posturing. Michael pressed his hand against the baby’s chest. No father would refuse a ransom for his child, especially no father with so much money at his disposal. He shook his head. “No,” he said into the quiet room. “No.” They were going to get Mireille back, soon, and this would be over, forgotten. They would go home to their real lives. They would forget all about this place; finally, they would be free of it, forever.

If he could just hear Mireille’s voice for a few seconds, the tightness in his chest might loosen. He might breathe again. He might let go of the nagging realization that all this was too far beyond his control.

Kidnapping. The word didn’t even feel real. When Michael called his parents just before putting Christophe to bed, they listened in disbelief, promised to pray for Mireille even though they weren’t usually much for praying, not anymore. The more he thought about it, Michael could not think of a single person he knew who had much faith at all. He was starting to understand why. “You get her back, no matter what,” his mother, Lorraine, said, her voice steely. “You get her back right now and then you get on a plane with my grandson and bring your family home.”

Michael promised he would and his parents pretended they did not know how hollow those words were.

His head still hurt, and the wound on his forehead itched beneath the gauze. Michael closed the laptop and set it on the floor. There was too much online, too much to know and see—stories of people held hostage for years, tortured for no reason at all, ears cut off, human trafficking. Michael rolled onto his side, pulling his son into the warm cave of his body. He closed his eyes and reached for the empty space just beyond the child. He could almost feel Mireille’s skin against his, how she smiled in bed when she turned toward him, her chin jutting gently forward, her lips slightly parted, eyes half-lidded. She was the most beautiful girl and she was his. Her smile. That’s what he would focus on. Before long, Michael had drifted into a sleep as fitful as his son’s.

The call to make arrangements for the ransom came the next morning at 10 a.m., as promised. Sebastien answered the phone and the negotiator picked up a second receiver, started the recording equipment.

“We have your daughter. The price is one million dollars U.S. We are ready to make arrangements for the delivery of the money and the return of your daughter.”

Sebastien tried to stay calm. He looked down at his hand, saw it was shaking. He frowned, shoved his hand in his pocket. “We don’t have that kind of money,” Sebastien said.

“Let us not play these games. They are beneath us.”

The negotiator gave Sebastien a look and Sebastien nodded, clearing his throat. “We are willing to pay one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, not one penny more. Hear me clearly.”

Michael hovered near Sebastien; his eyes were glassy with panic, more of the naked, wild emotion that made Sebastien Duval so uncomfortable.

“One hundred and twenty-five thousand,” Sebastien repeated. “And I want my daughter back within the next twenty-four hours.” He swallowed hard and hung up.

Michael’s eyes widened. “Are you insane? You’re trying to bargain them down?” He rushed at his father-in-law, swinging his arms, but the negotiator stood between the two men, gripped Michael’s arms until he stilled.

“This is how these matters are handled. You have to trust my expertise,” the negotiator said.

The three men stood in uncomfortable silence staring at the phone. It did not ring.

“This is sheer lunacy,” Michael muttered. “This is not how we’re going to get Miri back. You didn’t see them and their guns. They aren’t messing around.”

Sebastien raised his hand in the imperious manner that drove Michael crazy. He wanted to break all the fingers in the man’s hand. He clenched his jaw, forced himself to stay calm. Circles of sweat spread from beneath his arms across his back.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. Sebastien counted to ten, then picked up the phone. “Yes,” he said.

“The ransom for your daughter is one million dollars U.S. We will not negotiate.”

Sebastien had always been able to make difficult decisions. When he left everything he had known, he had been nothing more than a boy, really, always hungry, his feet caked with dirt at the end of each day. He abandoned his nothing of a life to start anew in a strange country where he still had so little but knew it was possible to hope. He found his way, had made everything of himself.

“If that’s the case, I’m afraid there is nothing more for us to discuss,” Sebastien said, avoiding Michael’s stare. “That was my only offer. I expect my daughter returned to me within twenty-four hours, unharmed.”

Sebastien hung up the phone. As always, he would do what was necessary to protect his family, his entire family. Michael kicked a chair across the room and stormed out. Sebastien tried to ignore the doubt, so unfamiliar an emotion, tearing at the edges of his resolve. “This is the right choice,” he said softly. He wasn’t going to lose everything he had worked for to thieving losers, only to be left with nothing of a life again.

I
sweated everywhere—beneath my arms and between my thighs, along my spine. My breasts still leaked. My body was weeping but whenever I felt like crying I bit down on my knuckles until the pain distracted me. What little air there was grew so thick I thought I might die. My chest tightened ever more.

As a child, I felt that strange sense of suffocating, often. There was the heat of a Nebraska summer and there was the heat of Port-au-Prince and they were two very different things.

Every summer, my parents took us to Haiti during the worst possible time—June and July. We always began packing in early May. It was easy to sift through our clothes—nice outfits for church and visiting distant relatives, swimsuits for the beach, T-shirts and shorts to play with our cousins. The more difficult packing was the various goods we were expected to bring—American movies on videotape and later, DVD, Gap clothing, large bottles of olive oil and industrial-sized bags of rice from discount warehouses, small electronics, Nike sneakers, cornflakes, Tampax, all the things that were outrageously expensive and eagerly coveted in the motherland, what my siblings and I called Haiti, always with a smirk. My mother coordinated the packing efforts, putting these goods in suitcases large enough to accommodate the body of a large adult male, perhaps two. At the airport, we would stand in line with all the other
dyaspora
and their unfathomably large suitcases. I found the whole affair mortifying and tried to stand as far away from my parents and their embarrassing luggage as possible. It was easy to spot the Haitian families not only from the suitcases, but from the hovering masses of American-born children hiding in plain sight at a comfortable distance.

Before every trip, my parents reminded us of the proper etiquette for children in Haiti. They did not want us to draw undue attention to ourselves. They wanted us to be seen and not heard, speaking when spoken to, never speaking out of turn, never raising our voices or being disrespectful. Despite their best efforts we always drew attention to ourselves. My brother tried to sag his jeans until a stranger in the airport grabbed him by the ears and hitched his pants up to their proper place, sucking her teeth and shaking her head. Mona and I wore low-cut T-shirts and large hoop earrings and short skirts. All three of us wore headphones, listening to music our parents disapproved of. We answered our parents in English when they spoke to us in French.

The airport in Port-au-Prince was the worst place on earth for spoiled children. It was the only place we ever visited where you had to go outside after getting off the plane and before entering the terminal. The moment we started walking down the hot metal staircase, the unbearably thick air wrapped itself around our bodies, seeping into our pores. The walk across the tarmac was interminable as the throng of Haitians, elated or miserable about returning home, pushed us forward. We waited in an endless customs line overwhelmed by the heat and the smell of so many sweaty people in cramped quarters and then, outside the airport as we waited for a cab or a relative to pick us up, it was like being thrown into the middle of a riot, everyone shouting, waving their hands wildly in the air, ignoring the rules of polite conduct and personal space.